Seminar on the ecology of diving birds by Dr Timothée Cook on 4 August

Dr Timothée Cook, a CoE postdoctoral fellow at the FitzPatrick Institute will present a talk on "The ecology of diving birds: behavioural and sexual responses to environmental variability"in the Niven Library at 13:00 on Tuesday 4 August.

Timothée is doing a postdoctoral study with Peter Ryan on the foraging ecology of South African marine cormorants. He will be presenting a summary of the research he did in France for his PhD on the foraging ecology of blue-eyed shags (the Crozet and Kerguelen shags). Blue-eyed shags are Southern Ocean species adapted to life in a cold environment and their diving ecophysiology is of particular interest as are the marked sexual differences in foraging ecology displayed by these species. Timothée uses blue-eyed shags as a model for studying the effect of environmental variability on diving strategies and sexual divergence in foraging behaviour.